Mass Effect 3 "Citadel" DLC

(We'll keep the spoilers to a minimum in this report, both for Mass Effect 3 in general and the "Citadel" DLC specifically, but the YouTube videos I link to do contain complete scenes from the DLC. Expect spoilers if you click through.)

Mass Effect 3 has had several downloadable content packages released which expand on some aspects of the single-player game, including most recently the "Omega" package, but this week Bioware let loose rather a different single-player pack: the "Citadel" DLC. What makes it different isn't just that it includes participation from every major Mass Effect crew character and voice actor—though that's a welcome change from some past Mass Effect DLC packs—but that the focus of the package isn't really on tossing Shepard and crew into another combat arena. Instead, the DLC quite literally lets the crew of the Normandy get boozed up and partied out...and it's great.

It’s all about the journey

When Mass Effect 3 was released a bit over a year ago, the reviews were mixed. It drew praise for its strong story and powerful emotional beats, but at the same time there was the issue of that ending—it was an amazing 30-hour-plus journey capped off with what many felt was 15 minutes of hand-waving and three bad (and essentially identical) choices.

Bioware padded things out a bit with the "Extended Cut" DLC in June, adding more details to the ending, including a fourth dialog option that explicitly rejected the original three endgame choices, a response to many fans' claims that their Shepard would have told the ending's deus ex machina to go get stuffed. What I found to be the most important part of the "Extended Cut" DLC, though, was the extra battlefield scene just before the final showdown, wherein Shepard is given one last moment to say goodbye to whichever crewperson he or she had formed a romantic relationship with.

Enlarge/ Saying a battlefield goodbye to Liara, from the "Extended Cut" DLC.

Electronic Arts

The first game in the Mass Effect series was very much a formulaic, cookie-cutter Bioware game, complete with the requisite Tower of Hanoi puzzle. But over the series' three games I've come to care deeply about Shepard and the crew of the Normandy. The friendships and romances formed are a significant part of the attraction, far more so than the combat, which has never really been my favorite. The role-playing aspect has been the reason I've stuck with Shepard and company. The moments in Mass Effect 3 that were the most powerful and beautiful weren't the huge set-piece explosion-fests, but the bits of character interaction between missions—the kind of things that people often write fan fiction about. What do the characters do when they're off-duty?

Hanging out with my space bros

In Mass Effect 3, players didn't have to write fan fiction to get a peek into the crew's rec time. Archeologist Liara T'Soni builds a time capsule. Stoic teammate Garrus Vakarian (my Shepard's space brother from another mother) takes Shepard target shooting and ends up with one of the greatest lines of dialogue in the entire series. Sure, the moments were obvious fan service, but after years of following the series, these palate-cleansing bits of fun were refreshing—more than refreshing, in fact. They were humanizing.

But what if there were more than a few isolated moments of fun to be had? What if there were a DLC containing a couple hours of pure, unadulterated silliness?

Enlarge/ Cool guys don't look at explosions. They kiss their girls as they turn away.

Electronic Arts

The "Citadel" DLC contains an interesting mission as its base, but its true purpose is to provide Commander Shepard and the Normandy crew with a giant apartment on the Citadel in which to throw the mother of all parties (I am not being metaphorical here). The DLC is a big, wet, sloppy three-hour fan-service kiss... and as everyone's favorite Turian once said, "I'm OK with that."

Enlarge/ Spending an evening with Tali watching Fleet and Flotilla, which is essentially Twilight in Space. Also, Tali sings.

Electronic Arts

The DLC's tone is light throughout, and every single main crew member from all three Mass Effect games gets at least a few minutes in the spotlight. Even the main plot mission, involving the theft of the Normandy by an unexpectedly familiar evil-doer, is carried off with tongue firmly in cheek. Characters offer up quips more often here and every scene feels like it's done with a nod and a wink to the fans.

It may be too silly for some fans, however. Mass Effect 3 is generally a pretty serious game, dealing with a galactic-level extinction event and the destruction of all known life. Shepard's team is on the clock for the whole game, trying to rally support for their war against world-destroying enemies, and the player is constantly reminded that even as the crew is relatively safe flying around in space, Earth is under siege. The rare bits of relaxation in the game feel like genuinely stolen moments, and there's always a bit of guilt that you're not trying harder to save Earth.

"Citadel" upends that. Shepard and the crew are on shore leave—dropping the Normandy off at dock and gettin' crunk in Admiral Anderson's enormous Citadel apartment. Without dropping spoilers, the DLC is timed to take place after the midpoint in the game. If it were inserted at that point into my first playthrough of Mass Effect 3, the interlude would seem ridiculous and out-of-place, releasing the game's tension like a balloon rapidly deflating. "Sure, the galaxy is at stake," it seems to say, "but let's all party and ham it up for the camera for a bit!"

Enlarge/ This is the kind of thing you'd expect to see on DeviantArt, and yet here it is: one last big goodbye picture of the crew.

Electronic Arts

But for most of the players interested in this particular DLC, it's not really taking place midgame. For those who have played through the game already, the DLC functions as Bioware clearly meant it to function: it's one last big, beautiful goodbye.

Once more, with feeling

Every important crewmember from each game gets a moment alone with Shepard. Some scenes, like those devoted to assassin and potential love interest Thane Krios, are heartbreaking; others, like bailing young Krogan teammate Grunt out from an encounter with Citadel Security, will make you smile so hard that your face will be in danger of cracking. Even love interests given short shrift in Mass Effect 3 (like Miranda Lawson and Jacob Taylor) are allowed one last extended scene with Shepard.

"Citadel" is just that—a series of "one last times," stuffed full of treasure for those who love the series and its characters. The folks at Bioware have absolutely outdone themselves, cramming in an almost overwhelming number of inside jokes and giggles. The DLC even offers a direct response to one of the most infamous bits of Mass Effect fan-generated insanity to ever pop up on the Internet: a creepy-weird bit of armchair chemistry theorizing about what ship engineer Tali's sweat would smell like.

For players like me who are emotionally invested in the series, "Citadel" is excellent. It's like a gift from Bioware, a perfect bit of fanwankery made canonical. Whether or not it fits in with the larger tone of Mass Effect 3 is questionable, but it gives us all one last chance to see Shepard and his crew happy. This can sometimes be a bit too much, like eating your entire haul after trick-or-treating, but who doesn't want to overdose on candy every once in a while?

Lee Hutchinson
Lee is the Senior Technology Editor at Ars and oversees gadget, automotive, IT, and culture content. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX. Emaillee.hutchinson@arstechnica.com//Twitter@Lee_Ars

I haven't played the ME games, nor I do know anything about the universe.

That said, I appreciate the attempt at objectivity in the article. It's refreshing to hear / see journalists be able to say "I can see how a lot of people may not like this, but here's my perspective, and I loved it."

It seems like this DLC would be more interesting if it took place after the main game. (If the story allowed for that.)

Considering that the main game already suffers a bit from "the Earth is about to be destroyed but I must go on every fetch quest possible and save cats in trees"-syndrome. It seems like this DLC will work best for people who have finished the game but are not completely burned by the franchise.

Personally I'm now firmly in the camp of people where Bioware now have to fucking work to prove that I should give them any more money. (And I preordered all Mass effect games.)

I just played it yesterday, after I finished the game and it was great. There were some moments when I cringed a bit, but I enjoyed almost all of it. The tongue in cheek attitude and the quips made at pretty much everything, the elevators, the mako, etc.

Personally I'm now firmly in the camp of people where Bioware now have to fucking work to prove that I should give them any more money. (And I preordered all Mass effect games.)

FWIW, you should give them money for this. If you like the series and the characters, it's very emotionally rewarding. Worth every penny.

It's hard for a "party DLC" to be emotionally rewarding when we still know what's coming at the end. That's been the primary reason I haven't touched any ME3 DLC thus far despite the fact that I'm a self-professed Mass Effect fanboy who got the DLCs for 1 and 2 the moment they were available.

A strength of ME3, in my opinion, was the moments of levity in an otherwise serious plot. Tali and the "Emergency Induction Port", Garrus' 'picnic' with Shepard at the Citadel, Tali/Garrus getting caught, and the banter from characters like Wrex, and Grunt are fine examples. But those underscored the (for lack of a better word) humanity of the characters and the graveness of what was to come. Taking a break to throw a party and have some fan service while Earth is burning? Meh. Doing all this knowing that, at the end, we still have a terrible deus ex machina with a contrived ending that really doesn't resolve what happened to these characters we spent so much time with? Double meh.

EA-Bioware decided to take light fanfic from their forums, canonize it in the story line, then ask you to pay for the privilege of playing it. Oh, I'm sure it's a better DLC than most but the ending issue burned me out, I don't like EA enough to continue contributing to their ruination of development studios, and, as you pointed out, I'm one of those folks who finds it to be too silly to fit into the game.

It seems like this DLC would be more interesting if it took place after the main game. (If the story allowed for that.)

Considering that the main game already suffers a bit from "the Earth is about to be destroyed but I must go on every fetch quest possible and save cats in trees"-syndrome. It seems like this DLC will work best for people who have finished the game but are not completely burned by the franchise.

Glad that this bothered other people, too. The game keeps saying time is of the essence, the longer you wait, the more people on Earth will die, but then there's no penalty for screwing around at length doing side quests. In fact, it's kind of encouraged. Which is fine, but don't make a galaxy for me to explore and then tell me that while I'm exploring it, innocent people are dying.As for the DLC itself, interesting, but $15 is a lot to spend for just fanservice (for me, at least), and I've pretty much walked away from Mass Effect for now. Not in the "I hate Bioware forever because of the ending" sense (I liked the Extended Cut endings), just in the sense that I played it through, laughed, cried, saved the universe, and have since moved on to other games. Not really interested in going back to ME3 until I'm more caught up on my backlog of other games to play.

You can have personal time with Miranda with 4 new/different scenes, each of which is she wearing a different colored outfit that crawls impossibly into crevices in ways that clothing simply doesn't in real life?

I just re-bought this game for $12 used and refuse to pay $15 for dlc on principle.

What annoys me more is they don't include the DLC in the later repackaged edition (like their own Dragon Age). ME2 came out three years ago, available from Amazon for under $20, and you still have to buy the DLC separately (Xbox version), which totals over $25?

I'm not sure why, but I find myself reluctant to shell out $15 for "Citadel". I know it's penny-pinching, but I'd feel better if it were $5. Or even $10.

I think part of what I'm concerned about is the level of interactivity. I have this gnawing fear that I could just as easily get 90% of Citadel's awesomeness from Youtube. Are we actually getting 4GB of Bioware gameplay or just 4GB of (awesome) Bioware writing?

The friendships and romances formed are a significant part of the attraction, far more so than the combat, which has never really been my favorite. The role-playing aspect has been the reason I've stuck with Shepard and company.

Same here, and yet they turned Mass Effect 3 into a FPS with occasional menus compared to the amount of RPG stuff in the first game.

Lee Hutchinson wrote:

It's like a gift from Bioware, a perfect bit of fanwankery made canonical.

Except that their "gift" costs 14.99 USD, and considering the ending screwup it should have been a real gift.

I bought Mass Effect 1 physical copy, I preordered Mass Effect 2 Digital Deluxe Edition on Steam and for the sake of completeness I bought Mass Effect from Steam again. The ME3 ending, coupled with their initial response to criticism and especially making the game Origin "exclusive" turned me from a Bioware rabid fan to someone who will never give them another cent.

EA really needs to put a full pack of DLC for this game already. I hate this cookie-cutter DLC that keeps adding stuff after I have finished (which is over a year ago at this point). Fine, charge $100 for your game, but I want to experience everything the first time around.

Except that their "gift" costs 14.99 USD, and considering the ending screwup it should have been a real gift.

I don't think that's realistic, or even really fair. The ending mess was addressed with a free bit of DLC (though whether or not you think the extended cut actually fixed anything is another matter). I don't begrudge Bioware some bucks for this kind of DLC, which even if you can't stand Bioware does feature a lot of recorded dialog from talented voice actors who work for a living.

It's definitely not for everyone, though, and there are more than enough youtube videos out there to let you vicariously experience the whole thing without having to actually buy it. Still, I found it a good use of my dollars.

I'm not sure why, but I find myself reluctant to shell out $15 for "Citadel". I know it's penny-pinching, but I'd feel better if it were $5. Or even $10.

I think part of what I'm concerned about is the level of interactivity. I have this gnawing fear that I could just as easily get 90% of Citadel's awesomeness from Youtube. Are we actually getting 4GB of Bioware gameplay or just 4GB of (awesome) Bioware writing?

finished it, boredom got the better of me last night and i bought it.

felt $10 would have been fairer also.

I liked what they did but the articles main picture really does sum it up.